Vinyl Prayers

Have you ever wanted to listen to songs and selections on vinyl that formally and/or affectively implore you to move against and beyond, to encounter an otherness that refuses reduction, to somehow, and miraculously, satisfy the desire to be someone or someplace else, at least for a moment? If so, then this portal, curated by John Modern, is for you. For in this virtual mix-tape of vinyl prayer, transgression and transcendence are the order of the day: in the harmonies, in the stentorian instruction, in the skips and confounds and glitches and snags that move from an initial sense of disruption to loop to loop to soothing predictability and perhaps a world in which beauty, truth, and reality are suspended as categorical imperatives, at least until you walk over and nudge the needle.

Vinyl Prayers | November 19, 2013

Born of privilege (a Rothschild pedigree and a father who was a vice president of Levi Strauss manufacturing), Samuel L. Lewis was one of the more colorful American mystics, who, at the end of his life, shifted from preparing himself for enlightenment to ushering in a new age of enlightenment.

Vinyl Prayers | November 19, 2013

In this cover version of Norman Greenbaum’s 1969 original, salvation becomes a social occasion, perhaps even a bureaucratic process. “Spirit in the Sky” is performed, here, by the hastily assembled Sisters and Brothers, who sing it as part of a “rock mass”—a concept made popular by the Australian nun Sister Janet Mead, in the early 1970s.

Vinyl Prayers | November 19, 2013

The Addicts were assembled by the Pentecostal evangelist John Gimenez, whose ministry revolved around “dope addiction.” Gimenez, a former addict, conceived of the idea of a play about the lives of “junkies,” and their redemption, in 1963.

Vinyl Prayers | November 19, 2013

Malcolm Boyd is, perhaps, best known for being an early supporter of gay rights within the Episcopal Church (publicizing his homosexuality in 1977). Boyd had become an Episcopal priest some twenty-five years earlier, having had a successful career in advertising and television.

Vinyl Prayers | November 19, 2013

Re-Creation is a non-profit organization founded in 1976 by Hugh Brooks in State College, Pennsylvania. As Re-Creation’s website exclaims, its “main service is to America’s Veterans Affairs Medical Centers and State Veterans Homes.

Whatever prayer is or has been it seems, often, to be bound up in the play of transgression and transcendence. Within the move across there are the moves against and the moves beyond. Against and beyond simultaneously, continuously, even as a prayer is conceived and uttered, even after it is ignored or answered.